No More Volunteers: College Sports Meets Collective Bargaining

The University of Tennessee’s flirtation with collective bargaining blows the lid off the NCAA’s favorite parlor trick-operating a multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate while pretending the workforce is strictly there for the library privileges-and hands HR and recruiting leaders a masterclass in what happens when you dodge basic people operations for a century.

Way down yonder, in a little old town in the Smoky Mountain foothills known as Knoxville, Tennessee, a cohort of college basketball players recently committed what may stand as the single most subversive act in the history of the NCAA (or at least, one that doesn’t involve throwing tortillas).

Three Volunteers who’d rather not be were seated across a conference table from management, negotiating their compensation and working conditions like actual, tax-paying adults. Nobody had to incorporate a shell company in Delaware, launder money through a booster nursing a suspiciously bloated “marketing budget,” or claim a six-figure wire transfer represented fair-market value for a fifteen-second Instagram Reel promoting a local Chevy dealership.

Rather, they simply convened to discuss payroll, benefits, binding contracts, and workplace rules-basic Human Resources, in other words, which college athletics has spent the better part of a century treating like a capital offense, with literal “death penalties” being meted out for the most flagrant violators of the NCAA rulebook.

In case you missed the news, earlier this week, the University of Tennessee and its men’s basketball roster unveiled a model collective bargaining agreement-engineered alongside Athletes.org that reads less like an extracurricular handbook and more like a functioning blueprint for modern talent management. And the best part is, it gives me an excuse to write a post about college sports while maintaining a plausible news hook, which is kind of chill.

Three elected player representatives from the Vols Mens’ hoops squad hammered out a term sheet with university brass, including athletic director Danny White, establishing proposed salary bands, institutional spending floors, guaranteed minimum pay, caps on agent fees, post-eligibility medical coverage, and a mutually negotiated transfer calendar.

Before anybody starts chanting “Solidarity Forever” over a good old round of “Rocky Top,” let’s inspect the fine print, here: this labor agreement isn’t legally binding; the Volunteers’ negotiators haven’t certified a union with the National Labor Relations Board, and Knoxville hasn’t yet transformed into Harlan County, USA, although the accents might convince you otherwise.

The thing is, this hypothetical CBA remains the sort of non-applicable proof of concept that research universities have been funding for years now. This time, though, the experiment is happening in real time, with potential real world implications. The thing is, following years of scorched-earth litigation, regulatory contortions worthy of Cirque du Soleil (not to mention a delusional campaign to preserve the Victorian myth of amateurism while compensating nineteen-year-olds like hedge fund managers, that proof of concept starts looking surprisingly like adulting for a bunch of SEC undergrads.

For CHROs, people leaders, and talent acquisition executives watching from the corporate sidelines, the developments in Knoxville aren’t merely a sports sidebar; they’re a case study in organizational survival and transformation management.

The Rocky Road to Rocky Top

Throughout the NIL era, college sports has attempted to retrofit a professional payroll onto an amateur regulatory framework, achieving roughly the structural integrity of a DIY frat house hot tub that was hammered together during rush week (or so, I’ve heard – I obviously have no direct experience with such hijinks).

While coaches signed eight-figure contracts, athletic directors managed budgets rivaling Fortune 1000 subsidiaries, and conferences negotiated media-rights packages boasting enough zeros to make a defense contractor blush, the actual talent generating the EBITDA were supposedly risking torn ACLs purely for a prepaid dining-hall swipe card.

Although the 2025 House v. NCAA settlement (initiated by former UCLA hoopster Ed O’Bannon, who surprisingly didn’t Bruin this opportunity) opened the door for institutions to share roughly $21.5 million per school directly with athletes for the 2026-27 academic year, the NCAA still erected a Kafkaesque compliance labyrinth distinguishing direct pay from third-party “commercial endorsements.” This distinction, obviously, was entirely lost on Reggie Bush’s landlord.

Every human capital leader who’s watched a hiring manager bypass structured salary grades with discretionary spot bonuses knows how this story ends: shadow compensation systems destroy internal equity, invite regulatory scrutiny, and turn recruiters into full-time compliance referees.

Tennessee’s proposal offers a radically cleaner alternative: acknowledge that athletes provide labor, institute transparent pay bands, and negotiate the rules with the people actually doing the work (and who have an open door to the transfer portal perpetually ajar).

SEC Filings: Red Flags, Redshirts and the Joint-Employer Trap

The single most compelling reason management ought to embrace collective bargaining is what workers willingly concede in exchange for economic security. Every major professional sports league-from the NFL to the NBA relies upon CBAs to enforce salary caps, restrict free agency, and lock in multi-year contracts, surviving federal scrutiny under the non-statutory labor exemption to the Sherman Antitrust Act only because those restraints were bargained bilaterally.

Yes, I know that Major League Baseball doesn’t have salary caps or contract limitations, but that’s likely to change after the old CBA expires at the end of the year, likely leading to a protracted work stoppage before the workers finally give into management – although this year’s small market World Series is something of a plot twist in what was shaping up to be a familiar story.

At present, though, college athletics demands every employer-side handcuff without accepting a single ounce of fiduciary obligation, trapping talent inside the NCAA transfer portal, which is essentially LinkedIn with shoulder pads and entertainment value, where coaches sermonize about loyalty right up until they bolt for a raise before bowl season (looking at you, Lane).

Yet, scaling collective bargaining across hundreds of universities entails navigating what scanning legal Substacks and reading case law summaries suggest could be three massive structural landmines. It goes without saying, but I’m not a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice (too bad, as this would be firewalled, and I’d be making way more money):

• The Classification Time Bomb: Following the Third Circuit’s 2024 Johnson v. NCAA ruling that athletes may qualify as employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act, AD Danny White pitched a centralized national employment entity to sidestep state bans on public-sector unions. However, as any employment litigator will attest, outsourcing payroll to a third-party doesn’t erase joint-employer liability when management (or a coaching staff) still control every waking hour of a players’ day. Deel with it.
• The Title IX Balance Sheet: A July 2026 Government Accountability Office report found that 94 percent of Division I programs already run operating deficits, leaning on $7.2 billion in institutional subsidies before House payroll even hits the ledger. In an October 2026 Yale Law Journal essay, Texas law professor (not an oxymoron) Mechele Dickerson warns that employment models could widen disparities between revenue sports and Olympic squads, triggering Title IX collisions if non-revenue rosters get axed.
• A Divided, Transient Workforce: A five-star quarterback chasing uncapped upside wants entirely different terms than a backup lineman seeking guaranteed minimum pay and post-eligibility healthcare (especially given that the NCAA’s current two-year excess accident coverage leaves chronic injuries unaddressed), while rapid three-to-four-year roster turnover makes union continuity infinitely harder to sustain than inside the NFLPA or NBPA.

The Playbook: What HR and TA Can Learn From College

You don’t need to manage a booster collective in order to extract immediate operational value from the NCAA’s labor reckoning; Knoxville, simply, is holding up the proverbial high-definition mirror (or Sunsphere) to the exact same process and policy breaking points as most American workplaces:

1. Kill Shadow Compensation Before It Kills Pay Equity. Relying on off-cycle exceptions and third-party workarounds to close top talent manufactures both internal resentment and legal risks (both are bad); build transparent, defensible pay bands upfront so recruiters can close candidates cleanly, instead.

2. Audit Contingent Talent for Joint-Employer Reality. Calling a worker an “amateur” or “independent contractor” will not save you from the Department of Labor when your managers control their schedule and daily output-reclassify proactively or relinquish operational control before a class-action attorney forces your hand.

3. Solve Retention With Mobility, Not Friction. Employees live on LinkedIn when internal career paths are opaque and pay lags the market; transparent internal transfer windows and clear promotion criteria outperform non-compete threats every time.

4. Stop Confusing Signing Bonuses With an EVP. Front-door cash gets bodies into seats, yet healthcare depth, sustainable workload guardrails, and genuine upskilling keep them from burning out by halftime.

5. Segment Your Workforce Strategy. A rainmaker wants uncapped upside, while a core operator prizes stability and predictable hours; co-design terms with the people doing the work rather than selling your entire team on the same training regime and practice schedule. Yeah, I know – the metaphors are getting a bit tired, just like…college football players after two a days.

Double Zeros: The End of Regulation Time

The truly remarkable aspect of Tennessee’s proposal is not how radical it appears, but how painfully obvious its underlying premise ought to have been fifty years ago: an enterprise extracts billions from skilled performers, performers want fair pay and healthcare, and management wants cost certainty and enforceable contracts.

Collective bargaining won’t magically cure every dysfunction in college sports, no more than it’ll spare corporate boardrooms who find themselves facing similar structural pressures (see: UPS, Amazon, Skydance, etc).

Yet, open negotiations that are both transparent and in good faith, no matter what the result might be, is surely a step in the right direction from the regulatory smoke and mirrors (or executive fiats) that the NCAA relies on to prop up its self-appointed status as the last guardian of purely amateur sports, lest it go the way of the Olympics and be forced to share those billions of dollars in revenue its athletes generate.

Trust me, as someone who went to USC when Pete Carroll was the head coach, Reggie Bush was the highest paid football player in LA County (the Rams were still in St. Louis, and the Chargers were still playing in a place where people cared about, you know, the Chargers), and the only thing flashier than the team’s offense were the brand new whips in the player parking lot – the NCAA has operated like a professional sports league for decades, and players have long done their best to keep up that appearance, even if it means the occasional institutional fine or temporary athletic scholarship loss.

What’s happening in Tennessee, however, suggests that college athletic departments should cut the act and start actually acting like real employers instead of, you know, whatever the hell it is they do in non-profits and academia. And maybe, for once, the talent will actually get the chance to learn the playbook – even if they have to call an audible or two before the formation sets.

PS: yeah, there are a lot of football references in here for a story centered around basketball players – but honestly, 18 year olds have been getting paid to play basketball for decades, and the best high school hoops players would rather spend the year before their NBA eligibility playing in Athens or Beijing than in Storrs, CT or Lawrence, KS.

Mamba Mentality, ftw.